Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (536 page)

There is the question of dog stories. I like dogs and would like to write at least one dog story in the style of Mr. Terhune, but see what happens when I take pen in hand:

DOG
THE STORY OF A LITTLE DOG

Only a newsboy with a wizened face, selling his papers on the corner. A big dog fancier, standing on the curb, laughed contemptuously and twitched up the collar of his Airedale coat. Another rich dog man gave a little bark of scorn from a passing taxicab.

But the newsboy was interested in the animal that had crept close to his feet. He was only a cur; his fuzzy coat was inherited from his mother, who had been a fashionable poodle, while in stature he resembled his father, a Great Dane. And somewhere there was a canary concerned, for a spray of yellow feathers projected from his backbone —

You see, I couldn’t go on like that. Think of dog owners writing in to the editors from all over the country, protesting that I was no man for that job.

I am thirty-six years old. For eighteen years, save for a short space during the war, writing has been my chief interest in life, and I am in every sense a professional.

Yet even now when, at the recurrent cry of “Baby needs shoes, “ I sit down facing my sharpened pencils and block of legal-sized paper, I have a feeling of utter helplessness. I may write my story in three days or, as is more frequently the case, it may be six weeks before I have assembled anything worthy to be sent out. I can open a volume from a criminal-law library and find a thousand plots. I can go into highway and byway, parlor and kitchen, and listen to personal revelations that, at the hands of other writers, might endure forever. But all that is nothing — not even enough for a false start.

Twice-Told Tales

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories — each time in a new disguise — maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

If this were otherwise, one would have to confess to having no individuality at all. And each time I honestly believe that, because I have found a new background and a novel twist, I have really got away from the two or three fundamental tales I have to tell. But it is rather like Ed Wynn’s famous anecdote about the painter of boats who was begged to paint some ancestors for a client. The bargain was arranged, but with the painter’s final warning that the ancestors would all turn out to look like boats.

When I face the fact that all my stories are going to have a certain family resemblance, I am taking a step toward avoiding false starts. If a friend says he’s got a story for me and launches into a tale of being robbed by Brazilian pirates in a swaying straw hut on

the edge of a smoking volcano in the Andes, with his fiancee bound and gagged on the roof, I can well believe there were various human emotions involved; but having successfully avoided pirates, volcanoes and fiancees who get themselves bound and gagged on roofs, I can’t feel them. Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion — one that’s close to me and that I can understand.

It’s an Ill Wind

Last summer I was hauled to the hospital with high fever and a tentative diagnosis of typhoid. My affairs were in no better shape than yours arc, reader. There was a story I should have written to pay my current debts, and I was haunted by the fact that I hadn’t made a will. If I had really had typhoid I wouldn’t have worried about such things, nor made that scene at the hospital when the nurses tried to plump me into an ice bath. I didn’t have either the typhoid or the bath, but I continued to rail against my luck that just at this crucial moment I should have to waste two weeks in bed, answering the baby talk of nurses and getting nothing done at all. But three days after I was discharged I had finished a story about a hospital.

The material was soaking in and I didn’t know it. I was profoundly moved by fear, apprehension, worry, impatience; every sense was acute, and that is the best way of accumulating material for a story. Unfortunately, it does not always come so easily. I say to myself — looking at the awful blank block of paper — “Now, here’s this man Swankins that I’ve known and liked for ten years. I am privy to all his private affairs, and some of them are wows. I’ve threatened to write about him, and he says to go ahead and do my worst. “

But can I? I’ve been in as many jams as Swankins, but I didn’t look at them the same way, nor would it ever have occurred to me to extricate myself from the Chinese police or from the clutches of that woman in the way Swankins chose. I could write some fine paragraphs about Swankins, but build a story around him that would have an ounce of feeling in it — impossible.

Or into my distraught imagination wanders a girl named Elsie about whom I was almost suicidal for a month, in 1916.

“How about me?” Elsie says. “Surely you swore to a lot of emotion back there in the past. Have you forgotten?”

“No, Elsie, I haven’t forgotten. “

“Well, then, write a story about me. You haven’t seen me for twelve years, so you don’t know how fat I am now and how boring I often seem to my husband. “

“No, Elsie, I — “

“Oh, come on. Surely I must be worth a story. Why, you used to hang around saying good-bye with your face so miserable and comic that I thought I’d go crazy myself before I got rid of you. And now you’re afraid even to start a story about me. Your feeling must have been pretty thin if you can’t revive it for a few hours. “

“No, Elsie; you don’t understand. I have written about you a dozen times. That funny little rabbit curl to your lip, I used it in a story six years ago. The way your face all changed just when you were going to laugh — I gave that characteristic to one of the first girls I ever wrote about. The way I stayed around trying to say good night, knowing that you’d rush to the phone as soon as the front door closed behind me — all that was in a book that I wrote once upon a time. “

“I see. Just because I didn’t respond to you, you broke me into bits and used me up piecemeal. “

“I’m afraid so, Elsie. You see, you never so much as kissed me, except that once with a kind of a shove at the same time, so there really isn’t any story. “

Plots without emotions, emotions without plots. So it goes sometimes. Let me suppose, however, that I have got under way; two days’ work, two thousand words are finished and being typed for a first revision. And suddenly doubts overtake me.

A Jury of One

What if I’m just horsing around? What’s going on in this regatta anyhow ? Who could care what happens to the girl, when the sawdust is obviously leaking out of her moment by moment? How did I get the plot all tangled up ? I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England conscience — developed in Minnesota — and my greatest problem:

“Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back?”

Shall I say:

“I know I had something to prove, and it may develop farther along in the story?”

Or:

“This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over. “

The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional. There are often occasions when such a decision is doubly difficult. In the last stages of a novel, for instance, where there is no question of junking the whole, but when an entire favorite character has to be hauled out by the heels, screeching, and dragging half a dozen good scenes with him.

It is here that these confessions tie up with a general problem as well as with those peculiar to a writer. The decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime. In youth we are taught the rather simple rule never to quit, because we are presumably following programs made by people wiser than ourselves. My own conclusion is that when one has embarked on a course that grows increasingly doubtful and feels the vital forces beginning to be used up, it is best to ask advice, if decent advice is within range. Columbus didn’t and Lindbergh couldn’t. So my statement at first seems heretical toward the idea that it is pleasantest to live with — the idea of heroism. But I make a sharp division between one’s professional life, when, after the period of apprenticeship, not more than 10 per cent of advice is worth a hoot, and one’s private and worldly life, when often almost anyone’s judgment is better than one’s own.

Once, not so long ago, when my work was hampered by so many — false starts that I thought the game was up at last, and when my personal life was even more thoroughly obfuscated, I asked an old Alabama Negro:

“Uncle Bob, when things get so bad that there isn’t any way out, what do you do then?”

Homely Advice, But Sound

The heat from the kitchen stove stirred his white sideburns as he warmed himself. If I cynically expected a platitudinous answer, a reflection of something remembered from Uncle Remus, I was disappointed.

“Mr. Fitzgerald, “ he said, “when things get that — away I wuks.”

It was good advice. Work is almost everything. But it would be nice to be able to distinguish useful work from mere labor expended. Perhaps that is part of work itself — to find the difference. Perhaps my frequent, solitary sprints around the track are profitable. Shall I tell you about another one? Very well. You see, I had this hunch — But in counting the pages, I find that my time is up and I must put my book of mistakes away. On the fire? No! I put it weakly back in the drawer. These old mistakes are now only toys — and expensive ones at that — give them a toy’s cupboard and then hurry back into the serious business of my profession. Joseph Conrad defined it more clearly, more vividly than any man of our time:

“My task is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. “

It’s not very difficult to run back and start over again — especially in private. What you aim at is to get in a good race or two when the crowd is in the stand.

RING

For a year and a half the writer of this appreciation was Ring Lardner’s most familiar companion; after that, geography made separations and our contacts were rare. When my wife and I last saw him in 1931, he looked already like a man on his deathbed - it was terribly sad to see that six feet three inches of kindness stretched out ineffectual in the hospital room. His fingers trembled with a match, the tight skin on his handsome skull was marked as a mask of misery and nervous pain.

He gave a very different impression when we first saw him in 1921 — he seemed to have an abundance of quiet vitality that would enable him to outlast anyone, to take himself for long spurts of work or play that would ruin any ordinary constitution. He had recently convulsed the country with the famous kitten-and-coat saga (it had to do with a world’s series bet and with the impending conversion of some kittens into fur), and the evidence of the betting, a beautiful sable, was worn by his wife at the time. In those days he was interested in people, sports, bridge, music, the stage, the newspapers, the magazines, the books. But though I did not know it, the change in him had already begun — the impenetrable despair that dogged him for a dozen years to his death.

He had practically given up sleeping, save on short vacations deliberately consecrated to simple pleasures, most frequently golf with his friends, Grantland Rice or John Wheeler. Many a night we talked over a case of Canadian ale until bright dawn, when Ring would rise and yawn: ‘Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time - I might as well go home.’

The woes of many people haunted him - for example, the doctor’s death sentence pronounced upon Tad, the cartoonist (who, in fact, nearly outlived Ring) — it was as if he believed he could and ought to do something about such things. And as he struggled to fulfil his contracts, one of which, a comic strip based on the character of ‘the busher’, was a terror, indeed, it was obvious that he felt his work to be directionless, merely ‘copy’. So he was inclined to turn his cosmic sense of responsibility into the channel of solving other people’s problems — finding someone an introduction to a theatrical manager, placing a friend in a job, manoeuvring a man into a good club. The effort made was often out of proportion to the situation; the truth back of it was that Ring was getting off - he was a faithful and conscientious workman to the end, but he had stopped finding any fun in his work ten years before he died.

About that time (1922) a publisher undertook to reissue his old books and collect his recent stories and this gave him a sense of existing in the literary world as well as with the public, and he got some satisfaction from the reiterated statements of Mencken and F.P.A. as to his true stature as a writer. But I don’t think he cared then - it is hard to understand, but I don’t think he really gave a damn about anything except his personal relations with a few people. A case in point was his attitude to those imitators who lifted everything except the shirt off his back - only Hemingway has been so thoroughly frisked — it worried the imitators more than it worried Ring. His attitude was that if they got stuck in the process he’d help them over any tough place.

Throughout this period of huge earnings and an increasingly solid reputation on top and beneath, there were two ambitions more important to Ring than the work by which he will be remembered; he wanted to be a musician - sometimes he dramatized himself ironically as a thwarted composer - and he wanted to write shows. His dealings with managers would make a whole story: they were always commissioning him to do work which they promptly forgot they had ordered, and accepting librettos that they never produced. (Ring left a short ironic record of Ziegfeld.) Only with the aid of the practical George Kaufman did he achieve his ambition, and by then he was too far gone in illness to get a proper satisfaction from it.